6
BY THE TIME I got home, I was sweating bullets in my long-sleeved shirt. I went to change into a T-shirt and discovered that most of them had shrunk, maybe because I’d grown a few inches this year, and didn’t completely hide the tattoo. I had to hunt hard to find a short-sleeved shirt that barely covered it. If only Sister Anita had stabbed me higher up the arm.
Got downstairs just as Jerry came home to punch me hello. Mom came charging in a little later, ordered me to set the table, and started making meatballs and spaghetti sauce. I got forks and knives, plates, and napkins and began setting them out on the dining room table.
In our old house we ate in the kitchen most nights. But when we moved to this house, we started eating in the dining room. Not because we turned fancy or anything. Because of the big red Nazi swastika on the kitchen floor.
When we came to look at this house for the first time, there was a round wooden table in the kitchen with a nice rug underneath. The day we moved in, the table and rug were gone, and there it was—a red swastika made of square floor tiles. The swastika must have been six feet across.
Both Mom and Dad began sputtering when they saw it, making these embarrassing “but . . . but . . . but” gasping sounds.
“That’s weird,” Jerry said.
“Bizarro,” I added. “I have to tell Philip. He knows a lot about World War Two and stuff.”
“Don’t say a word to him. Or anybody else! They might think we put it there!” Dad barked. “Helen, go call Mr. Farina while I get something to cover this . . . this . . .” He pointed at it as if it were an extra-large bowl of orange Jell-O with pineapple chunks in it.
Mr. Farina was the real estate agent who had sold us the house. When he saw the swastika, he sputtered the way my parents had. And apologized, too. At first he tried to suggest that it might be some sort of symbol used by western Indians, but when my mom gave him “the look,” he dropped that line of reasoning. “They seemed like such a nice couple,” he said, referring to the elderly husband and wife who sold us the house. “Who would have guessed.”
I had to agree. The husband and wife were both short and very round, like cream-filled doughnuts. At one point while we were looking at the house, the wife had said with great fondness, “We’ve had such nice times here. During the war we had our club meetings right here in the kitchen.” Later I thought someone should have asked them what sort of club they hosted. I mean, Nazis in New Jersey! Who the heck knew?
Mr. Farina said he’d get the red tiles replaced with green ones that matched the rest of the floor. But the new tiles that arrived were a lot lighter than the old ones, and my parents decided that a fresh, minty green swastika was as bad as a blood-red one. So we still had the swastika, and now it looked as if the whole floor would have to be replaced to get rid of it. Until then, Dad refused to eat in the kitchen, period. He wouldn’t even drink his evening bottle of Pepsi-Cola in there.
Table setting was an oddly important procedure in our house. Once, I complained to my mom about the silly, complicated rules for where the forks, knives, spoons, glasses, etc., etc., had to be put. Who decided this? I wanted to know. And why? And why did we have to follow those rules anyway? It wasn’t as if the president would be coming for Mom’s meatball and spaghetti dinner.
Mom looked perplexed about my rebellious attitude, then quoted some expert on the subject who obviously loved the idea of utensil and glassware rules. “A properly set table,” Mom said in a serious voice, “is the canvas for a beautiful meal.”
My mom’s an artist. She cut out a piece of paper the same size as our place mats and drew in where everything was supposed to go, including which direction knife blades should face (toward the plate, in case you’re wondering) and the position of the water glasses.
I had memorized the paper plan and could put everything on the table automatically. I was halfway through the chore when my brother suddenly asked, “So who’s K.G.?”
K.G.? What was he . . . Then I remembered my tattoo. “Ah, nobody.”
“Does my little brother have a girlfriend?”
“No, no.” I glanced down where the tattoo was and saw that my sleeve had ridden up. In a panic, I swiped it down to cover the black and red marks. “It’s nothing. It’s a baseball player’s initials.” My mind did a freaky fast search of baseball player names and came up with, “It’s Ken Gables. He was a pitcher.” This was one hundred percent true, but I couldn’t remember who he played for or if he was any good.
“Yeah, right,” Jerry said. “So why the red heart?”
Red heart? I picked up the sleeve and realized that in trying to wash off the red, I had dragged some of the ink down, so it did kinda look like a heart. A blurry one, but definitely a heart. I covered the tattoo up again.
“And not just a red heart,” my brother added, “but a red ‘I love you’ heart.”
“Shut up,” I hissed. Panic was closely followed by brain sizzle and made any other reply impossible. I just stared at him and tried to gulp in air.
“So who exactly is this K.G.?”
“I told you already . . .”
Just then the phone in the kitchen rang, interrupting Jerry’s interrogation. I thought I’d never heard a more welcome sound. Saved by the bell, I thought. Or whatever sound the phone made. Mom was rolling meatballs and asked Jerry to answer the phone. Jerry gave me a look that said Yeah, right, and left the dining room. I started tossing forks, knives, and spoons onto the table, thinking I’d finish up fast and flee to my room to hide until dinner was ready.
Of course I should have known better, considering the way my luck had been running lately. I was putting down the last spoons when my brother called from the kitchen. “Oh, Jim-mee,” he said in this drawn-out, singsongy, annoying voice. “It’s for you-ooo.” There was a pause. “It’s a girl.”
I hustled into the kitchen to get the phone from him before he did any more damage. Mom said, “A girl?” in a somewhat concerned tone. Maybe she was worried that I’d taken up story writing again.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “It’s about homework.”
I grabbed the phone from Jerry, grunted angrily at him, and put my hand over the receiver. As my brother strolled past, he whispered, “Ken Gables my ass.”
When Jerry was out of the room, I grumbled and said “Yeah” into the receiver a little more sternly than I’d wanted. “I mean, hello.”
“You were supposed to call at seven,” Ellen said crisply. “You told Sister Angelica you would.”
“I forgot,” I said, which was true enough. “I was setting the table for dinner,” I added lamely.
“You need to remember to call. And if you have to do something else first, you should call and let me know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Okay?”
“Sure.” I took the phone to the stairs leading to the basement and sat down. I had no idea why Ellen wanted to help me, of all people, but it was clear this was going to be just one of many long calls.
“So,” Ellen began, “do you know what we’re supposed to do for spelling?”
Now I had her! I had actually jotted down the spelling assignment, and even got Philip to fill me in on what else we had to do for homework. I figured that if I could show Ellen I had the assignments under control, she’d go away and not bother me anymore. “Yeah, take the ten words on the list and put them in a sentence. I wrote that down.”
“Good. But you have to spell them correctly and you have to punctuate correctly, too. Have you done them yet?”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
“And for math . . .”
“I know what to do,” I said confidently. And I told her what it was.
Only it wasn’t. Angelica had assigned fifteen specific problems from the text, but Philip had copied some of the numbers down wrong. Even if I got the answers right, I’d still fail. As Ellen told me the correct problems to do, I realized I should probably tell Philip. This might violate the rule about sixth-grade guys talking about homework, but it seemed only fair.
The rest of the conversation went pretty much the same way, and I had a sinking feeling I wouldn’t be getting rid of Ellen and her phone calls anytime soon. We ended with her saying we’d meet before school so she could go over my homework. Trust me, I tried to tell her this wasn’t necessary, but Ellen could be very . . . I’m not sure how to put this . . . she could be very persistent.
Now I was trapped, and it was all Sister Angelica’s fault. I knew I had to do better in school to win over Kathy Gathers, but this wasn’t how I wanted to do it.
Dinner dragged along with the usual sort of chatter. “How was your day?” “Okay.” “Did anything interesting happen?” “No.”
The highlight of dinner came when there was a pause in this scintillating conversation and Jerry said, “Jimmy was telling me all about this amazing Ken Gables superstar guy, right?” He looked at me and gave me an evil smile. I could tell he wasn’t going to let me off the hook anytime soon. “Maybe he can tell us more about K.G.”